Riordan drifted. A haze lay over his mind, leaving him without urgency or desire, stuck somewhere between waking and sleeping. Stuck somewhere between the physical and the spiritual. Beneath the drifting feeling, Riordan knew that he should be concerned, but even that thought was hard to muster with any real clarity. Bubbles of anger and fear and sadness boiled up inside him, only to fade away into the fuzzy haze of blackness that wrapped him like a vise.

He wasn’t supposed to wake up. He wasn’t ever supposed to wake up again. Riordan was locked in sleep. Was it okay to rest? He didn’t want to rest. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t done yet.

The bubbles of angry emotions roiled, pushing back at the darkness without progress. A death had gone into that binding, channeled crudely from a dying man through a blood link and right into Riordan. Sheer force of will wasn’t enough to beat that weight of magic and consequences. Indeed, Riordan should have felt nothing at all, locked in a sleep as deep as any fairytale curse, waiting for an external release that might never come.

However, since the moment he’d been hung from the killing tree, sleep was not a cage for Riordan, but a gateway. His body slept, unwakeable. His spirit floated in a limbo, suspended between the pull to the tree he was tied to and the spell wrapping his body like a net, but undoubtedly this limbo, a space at the edge of another space, was part of the spirit realm.

And in the spirit realm, Riordan was stronger.

Not strong enough to shake off such a powerful binding, but strong enough to press at it, unconsciously probing for weaknesses in the spell. Strong enough to bide his time, drawing on the anger and pain he’d been storing up, just waiting to bring those debts home to roost.

Not that time had discernible meaning in this place. It wasn’t even truly a place, as one physically thought of such things. Riordan was asleep. That meant he went to the spirit realm, close to the tree. Yet, his spirit was also caged up inside the binding. Trapped inside his physical body, an outsider would assume that cut Riordan off from the spirit world. Riordan was a shifter though. A spirit-touched shaman at that, with a keyed spirit gateway embedded in his soul, a pack bond to ghosts and a spirit in the spirit realm, and ritually tied to that same spirit via far more refined death magic than the crude sleep curse.

So instead of leaving his bound body, Riordan retreated further inside himself until he traveled the loop of meaning, one where all roads lead back to a certain tree, glowing in light and hung in death.

Information flowed into his clouded mind, present with demanding attention. The tree recognized him. Riordan was close to it, physically and spiritually. The tree worried about him, unable to avoid caring after Riordan forced it to see the truth of human suffering. It sheltered his soul in its branches and let the wind rock him in his sleep. Riordan felt kindness for its awkward attempts at reassurance and comfort, but couldn’t pull himself to enough consciousness to properly respond.

Still, Riordan thought the tree understood, their spirits touching at the edges.

Something stirred around his repose, the first stirrings of a storm wind that tugged upon him. It was a hungry wind, a devouring wind, ready to sweep the land with the ferocity of a swarm of locusts, leaving all bare and ruined behind it to feed itself. Fear joined the bubbling emotions. Riordan couldn’t think. He needed to think. He needed to act.

Riordan practically wailed in helpless rage, thrashing against a cage of magic that kept him from even looking doom in the damned face. The spell denied him the dignity of fighting as he went down. He was a fighter. He was a survivor. He was…

The storm grewing, tugging on the loose edges of his cage. The death magic wrapped around him brushed against the whirling swamp of stagnant death power and clung to it in bits, like bits of lint being attracted to a fuzzy sweater made of ghostly blood. The curse on him was powerful, but poorly crafted. It had never been intended to weather this storm, to hold up in this close proximity to the rise of a demigod of death. The killing tree ritual sipped upon Riordan’s curse, weakening it.

But not enough. Riordan felt awareness seeping in with each passing second, his purifying ritual pushing the curse out of him to his edges and the roaring pillar of power draining it away, but he couldn’t act. Riordan was still asleep and sequestered, mere witness to everything he had sworn to prevent, from some odd angled point of view that let him see only the depths and not the surface.

He pushed at his bindings, struggling with stubborn will against death in its many forms. Inside him, his shifter magic reinforced him, feeding into the purification effect. Riordan could feel his quickly cast spell beginning to fade out under the strain, but it was supported by his shifter nature and Frankie’s safeguard spells. His spirit self was strengthened and defined. His enemies’ spells were slowed, losing ground against his resistances. His power limiter safeguard choked the flow though and Riordan remembered.

He’d asked Frankie before he let her cast the safeguards if he’d be able to remove them. The limiter was to keep Riordan from doing the sorts of magical acts that had gotten him so spiritually entangled in the first place. To limit side effects of his intentions in the spirit realm. She’d told him that to remove them, he would need to find the spells inside himself and break them.

Looking inward magically was apparently an advanced skill. Riordan had gotten a crash course. Hell, he was stuck inside himself at the moment. He dove into his well and down to its source, the spring of power feeding into him from his core, where raw magic was drawn in and filtered. He’d only felt his core once before, in that moment he’d breathed in the safeguard spell forms and drawn them down to settle there, but the pathway opened before him and Riordan fell into himself.

The spell forms rotated slowly in that space, pulsing with the flow of power through them. Riordan would have preferred to break his limiter when it wasn’t in use, but there was no way he was going to stop the passive effects currently warring to free him. Perhaps it was appropriate that even his action of breaking the limiter was likely to have side effects. Riordan felt that was only right. He was willing to bear the consequences if it gave him an edge.

After all, right now, he had nothing.

He reached out, touching the limiter spell form. It felt like electricity in his soul, sending his senses into overdrive without being painful. His core was drawing in ambient magic with each breath and beat of Riordan’s life, breaking it down into the power he could use, and feeding it through the spell forms until it flowed into his well. He was touching an active magical circuit. Well, there was no help for it. He just had to do what he did best: break shit and wing it.

The limiter shattered as he pressed on it, flooding his core with undirected magic. Riordan scowled. It hurt, but after the shit he’d been through today, it barely even tickled. He did have to clamp down on the power arcing across the broken circuit. Sparks and shards flashed towards the still existent spell forms and Riordan rushed to contain the broken spell before it cracked the rest of them and set off a cascade.

Gathering up the pieces, Riordan decided to just shove them into his core. That should break them down and filter out anything left over from Frankie’s magic. The sensation was a cross between trying to shove trash into an already full garbage can, pushing and shoving until it all compacted just a bit more, and the feeling of overeating to the point of nearly vomiting.

Fuck it. Riordan didn’t let up until all the shards of the spell were gone. It left him feeling uncomfortably full and stretched inside his core, but Riordan didn’t have the time to do things slowly.

The swirl of power into his core rapidly fed magic into his well. Riordan winced. He’d have to use up some of that before he did damage to his well in addition to whatever effect stretching his core would have. His sense of his surroundings cleared and Riordan opened his eyes.

He stood with his back to the tree trunk, facing outward into a maelstrom of wailing death magic, tainted with death corruption and remnant pieces of the drained ghosts. The power screamed and roiled, whipping Riordan’s curls about in the illusionary wind. He stood at the eye of the storm, literally plastered to the bark of the spirit tree by the dripping ooze that threatened to swallow him and unable to move with the black net of his curse still cast over his spirit.

“Well, shit,” he muttered, his voice completely lost in the roar of power.

The tree spirit behind him remained solidly rooted. Its branches rattled in the storm like armies shaking their swords, but its heart was unaffected by the power that clung to it as an anchor. Or no, not unaffected. Riordan leaned against the tree and felt intense anger from the usually implacable spirit. Something was upsetting it.

Letting his eyes fall shut again, Rirodan touched his soul to the spirit, offering his own comfort to it this time combined with a query. What had made it feel so angry?

Sensations flooded into Riordan and he gasped, trying to make sense of the tree’s perspective. Many feet stood upon the ground of its clearing. The rotten fruits had been hidden, for all it could still feel them clinging to its boughs, but now the one who had bound it in ropes of death, who used it against its purpose, stood before it arrogantly, whipping up the power that the tree had been forced to bear. She shed her blood upon its roots and thought to command it. She shed tainted blood and thought to drink the power of dozens of deaths.

She bound the tree’s favorite mortal to it once more and threatened it harm. The tree cared. And it raged.

Riordan absorbed the information and was left reeling. The magic in this space, this spiritual representation of the killing tree ritual, was riled up because Phenalope was in the process of completing it. With his still cursed body as the centerpiece, of course. The tree’s perspective didn’t give Riordan a real sense of the other people in the clearing or if his reinforcements had any chance of arriving in time to help.

He thrashed, throwing more of the power filling his well at breaking the net around him. Around him, the storm trembled, its orderly swirl pausing and shifting, creating dangerous eddies and currents that threatened to destroy everything. Riordan felt the net around him crack--

Then a spear of darkness plunged through him, piercing into the void of his gateway.

The curse on Riordan broke fully under that new pressure, sucked away into the stream of shadow pouring through Riordan’s soul. Ghosts tumbled out of him as drops of blood before being caught in the winds of the ritual, strung out at the ends of their hanging ropes from the branches of the tree. Screams filled the air, mingling with the terror and power filling the air.

Riordan screamed wordlessly, reaching out towards his pack. He felt the threads of their bond and pulled on them, but was unable to wrench them free of the ritual. Then the rope around his left arm unfurled fully and flung him out into the storm as well.